Story details

My name is Nasima Azad and I come from Bangladesh originally. I live in Liverpool now. Our main food is rice. Agriculture is mainly rice in Bangladesh and people who don't have land borrow some and give a crop % to the landowner. For example 20% of what ever their crop is, and the growers keep the rest.

Every year people take the rice off the stems (harvesting), dry it by pouring it onto a big bamboo matt or in a big area in the garden. If they put it in the garden then first you need some mud to put on the ground to make it even and flat, and to hold down the dust. Then you can pour the rice on it.

Drying the rice. This takes 2-3 days. When the sun is the strongest; in the morning we put it out to dry. Say from 9/10 am - 4 pm (beginning of sunset). We always bring it back in at the same time because sunset is around the same time each day.

After it is dry, we use a rice machine to take the husks off, but not everyone has a machine so if you don't have one, you take the rice and pay for it to be done. We had a machine. Before boiling we call it sal, after cooking it is called bhatt.